SANTA CLARA, USA: Extreme Networks Inc. has announced ‘Widget Central,’ a new online resource that facilitates the free exchange, development, and modification of company and community-sponsored network enhancements through downloadable widgets.

These enhancements address deployment, monitoring, operations, and optimization needs of enterprises. Extreme Networks has concurrently announced the controlled release of its Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) for ExtremeXOS, the industry’s first modular operating system for LAN switches.

Widget Central is an innovative, free online resource designed to help customers achieve the perfect balance of acquisition costs, operational expenses, and solutions capabilities. To celebrate the site’s launch, Extreme Networks has contributed over 25 widgets that deliver immediate value for customers and also provide reference widgets for developers.

In a separate announcement today, Extreme Networks has detailed a series of new hardware products and an update to the ExtremeXOS operating system, all targeted at meeting the challenge of perfect balance in Enterprise networks.

“Widget Central will radically change how customers think about their network and their networking vendor. Now, users can easily benefit from Extreme Networks innovative network extensibility technologies for faster deployment, easier operations, better visibility, and enhanced performance,” said Scott Lucas, senior director of solutions marketing for Extreme. “The initial widgets provided by Extreme Networks are great examples of how customers can manage energy usage of power over Ethernet ports, deploy consistent security configurations, and automate dynamic configurations across the network. We are tremendously excited by the potential for community-developed enhancements as the site grows and matures.”

Extreme Networks widgets are organized into four categories: deployment, monitoring, operations, and optimization. Deployment widgets help customers quickly configure the network for specific security or convergence needs. Operations widgets enable customers to react to network events, such as the connection of a new handset to the network. Optimization widgets help customers tune network performance, and monitoring widgets provide customers with information on the health of the network.

All widgets are freely downloadable, may be modified to suit specific needs, and, in the spirit of community participation, may be enhanced and shared among users of Extreme Networks products.

Extreme Networks new SDK benefits technology partners, value-added resellers, and customers who seek to extend and enhance their solutions through web services-based interactions with the ExtremeXOS operating system. The SDK and associated support resources from Extreme Networks help developers leverage a comprehensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs).

These tested and mature interfaces have been used internally to integrate ExtremeXOS with Extreme Networks EPICenter management platform, the ScreenPlay on-switch management tool, and the Sentriant NG threat detection and mitigation appliance.